“There are a lot of people in this game, who write about this game, and who talk about this game, who were very invested in Roger Clemens being guilty,” Waldman said. “They are not going to change what they think.”

No, she wasn’t going to name names. She left that for the rest of us to figure out. Waldman was more transparent saying Cooperstown is all about the “history” of baseball and those alleged to be steroid cheats “with the numbers” – such as Clemens and Barry Bonds – still deserve to be voted into the Hall. The steroids era, she said, is part of the game.

“You can’t whitewash history. You can’t keep an entire group out because you don’t like how they got to the game,” she said. “We don’t know what happened. You can think you know Roger Clemens and everybody else took steroids. I don’t know and you don’t know.”

Waldman had some choice words about commentators with that particular opinion. The only ones fit to print in a family newspaper are “self-important.” Yet there was also an undeniable media consensus that the next “jury” Clemens faces, Hall of Fame voters, is the panel most important to him. And that he will be crushed, his life will come tumbling down, if he is not enshrined in Cooperstown.

“You don’t think Roger Clemens is prepared for this? Waldman asked. “. . . You don’t think Roger knows some writers don’t like him for one reason or another? Roger Clemens is a lot of things but he’s not stupid.”

After last night’s heroics from Mario Chalmers (and The Leg Cramps Heard ‘Round The World), LeBron James is now 48 minutes away from his first NBA Championship. So is Eddy Curry, but no one is gonna to publish a book length-hatchet job about the former Knicks/Bulls C, unlike the polarizing James who inspired Scott Raab’s “The Whore Of Akron”. The book has been commercially available for some time, but it seems the Philadelphia Daily News’ Stan Hochman just got around to finishing it, calling the self-obsessed Raab, “a narcissistic fraud”. Dubbing the Esquire scribe’s LBJ evisceration, “a nasty, vulgar little book about the sorry life and hard times of Raab”, Hochman isn’t quite willing to buy into the author’s thematic conceit (ie. the person holding the grudge might make for a better life story)

Raab never gets to sit down with James to poke around inside that sculpted body, searching for his elusive soul. The so-called new journalism doesn’t require direct quotes. If you are so smart, so smug that you know what the guy is going to say, you need not be there to take notes when he does talk.

Raab viciously twitters his way out of Miami credentials, so he pays scalper’s prices to sit in the stands and sneer at James. There is nothing duller in sports journalism than the diary of a writer tracking his target from a distance. And Raab, for all his writing skills, can be wicked boring at times.

Who gives a rat’s ascot for details about his sex life with his shiksa wife? Who has a twitch of sympathy for a guy so morbidly obese he needs to beg a stewardess for a seat-belt extension?

Pioneering U.S. guitarist Tom Carter (The Mike Gunn, Charalambides, Tom & Christina Carter) was recently hospitalized in Germany after contracting pneumonia on tour. Even when he’s out of intensive care, the recovery period (during which he can’t return home) should be lengthy, and the medical bills quite large. Give what you can.

On Tuesday, Russo was read Brees’ offending tweet, which inspired this response :

“I don’t care about Brees. I pay no attention to him. So he doesn’t like (George W.) Bush. An athlete doesn’t like Bush. None of them like Bush. How’s Iraq doing right now, pretty good? We got rid of a despot, right?”

The Dog ended this line of analysis by calling Brees, “a phony” who was “just out for Tom Benson’s millions”. Indeed, what could be more distasteful than a former Super Bowl winner trying to maximize his earning power while he still can? Certainly not an afternoon sports radio host barely conversant with his own program’s topics.

If you’re one of the delusional persons who took solace in 7-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens’ acquittal on federal perjury charges yesterday, I’m sorry to say there’s some very dark news concerning another sporting icon’s dalliance with illegal substances. The Philadelphia Daily News’ William Bender reports Wing Bowl fixture William “El Wingador” Simmons has been charged with distribution of cocaine. If you think that’s a somewhat flimsy topic for a CSTB post, you have no idea how hard it was to resist a headline reading, “Bill Simmons Finally Brought To Justice”. (link courtesy Jon Solomon)

Simmons, 50, of Woodbury Heights, was busted Friday and charged with 1st-degree drug distribution when police found approximately $8,000 worth of powdered cocaine and $4,000 in cash in his 2010 Kia Soul, cops said.
Nothing else of note was found in the car, which had a “El Wingador” vehicle wrap, said Lt. Stephen Jones.
“Wouldn’t you love some wings or sauce? But no, not that I know of,” Jones said.

Simmons, who has won five Wing Bowl titles, finished third in this year’s event after eating 250 wings. He finished second in 2011 after downing 254 wings, losing by one wing to Super Squibb.
“It is regrettable that Mr. Simmons’ notoriety has taken a negative turn,” said Gloucester County Prosecutor Sean F. Dalton. “However, the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office works closely with other law enforcement agencies to stop the significant distribution of controlled dangerous substances that is reflected in the charges against him.”

On Adidas’ Facebook page, the company calls the shoe ‘so hot you [will need to] lock your kicks to your ankles’. Critics, however, say the shoe represents an uncomfortable allusion to the slave trade or the prison system.

Adidas, which sponsors African-American athletes in every major professional sport, says the shoe “is nothing more than the designer Jeremy Scott’s outrageous and unique take on fashion, and has nothing to do with slavery.”

The statement adds: “Jeremy Scott is renowned as a designer whose style is quirky and lighthearted and his previous shoe designs for Adidas Originals have, for example, included panda heads and Mickey Mouse.”

Philadelphia-area sneaker enthusiast Mike Meech describes the shoes as part of a niche market of eccentric kicks.

“Jeremy Scott designed a pair of Adidas with gorillas where the tongue is – are those racist?” Meech said. “The fact is, this ‘controversy’ will probably just make the sneakers more popular. I’m sure Adidas is thrilled with the free promotion.”

Another local sneaker enthusiast, Kofi Biney, said he wasn’t offended by the shoe “in the slightest.”

“It’s manufactured outrage,” Biney said. “The designer even said that [the shoe] was based off a 90s cartoon called My Pet Monster.”

(UPDATE : Adidas’ Monday evening statement : “We apologize if people are offended by the design and we are withdrawing our plans to make them available in the marketplace.”)

Nats OF Bryce Harper hasn’t merely won over much of the baseball world with his hustle, willingness to get plunked without tantrum or ability to deflect stupid questions. He’s also been embraced by Mark Judge, author of “A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll”, who tells the Daily Caller‘s unlucky readership that Harper, “is a conservative hero” (“watching Bryce Harper play is like listening to an economic speech by Paul Ryan: It’s long on reality and short on excuses”). Some CSTB readers on the West Coast haven’t had breakfast yet, so I’ll spare you the part where he compares Jason Heyward loafing after a ball to teacher’s unions.

Harper has slapped baseball awake, and every time he steps up to the plate, years of crusty baseball routine no longer apply. He swings the bat with a blinding snap of force, and in the outfield dives for balls that bored veterans would let go. When he hits a double he usually tries to stretch it into a triple. Manager Davey Johnson tries to bench him for being hurt, and Harper confronts him and says, like a person with enough dignity to refuse welfare: Let me work. Then he wins the game with a crucial hit.

Conservatives, and even a few young liberals, accept that life isn’t fair, but that winners tend to be people who shake things up and pivot, even while never forgetting sound fundamental principles. This a good definition not only of Bryce Harper, who electrifies even while never botching the basics, but Mitt Romney, who understands the creative destruction of modern capitalism even as he has mastered the fundamentals of economics. Liberals will falsely claim that Romney wants to return to the 1950s, while never admitting that they are stuck in the much more dysfunctional 1960s.
If America is to be solvent and healthy, we cannot keep doing what we have been doing since the Miracle Mets won the World Series in 1969. We have to do things differently, just as Bryce Harper is not playing baseball the old way. Harper is not going to sit back and accept what the status quo tells him to accept (where does he get off stealing home?). And conservatives are not going to expect to retire at age 65 or to send their kids to the college of their choice if it costs $50,000 a year. We are going to adapt. (In a strange way, conservatives are not only like Bryce Harper, but have become like the do-it-yourself punk rockers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Don’t have a record label? Start your own. Are the old rock groups bloated and sloppy? Boot them off the stage.) Meanwhile, liberals occupy everything so that they can demand — what was it again? Oh yeah, peace. And taxes.

06.17.12

(the author of the piece excerpted below, is presumably stuck behind the flag-bearing gent with the beard)

After Washington suffered a 3 game sweep at the hands of the visiting Yankees, right about now would be a rotten time to start lecturing Nationals neophytes about their (allegedly) moronic habits while attending their NL East-leading club’s games. So that’s why I’ll leave the dirty work to The Atlantic’s Steve Tuttle, who calls his fellow D.C. patrons, “dead last in baseball fan etiquette,” (“I’m not even sure many of the new fans are aware a game is going on”).

If you get up during play at a Caps hockey game, the fans threaten to do things to you that are both unnatural and I believe—after much thought—physically impossible. That is as it should be. Even those Philly fans I loathe so much wouldn’t stand for that behavior. They literally wouldn’t stand for it, and they wouldn’t let you do it, either.

You also shouldn’t stand up when you buy a hot dog or a beer from the vendor. Remain seated and pass the money down the aisle and your change will magically make its way back down the row to you. Nats Park is the only place in Washington where your money gets passed along and nobody takes a cut. Decide on your tip before you send the money down instead of making us all do two passes. Better yet, if you’re buying two eight-dollar Miller Lites, you’ve already proven that you don’t value a dollar, so give him the whole twenty. And if the beer man is standing in front of you yelling over and over, “Coors and Coors Light!” don’t ask him if he has any Blue Moon. Because he has Coors and Coors Light. That’s why he keeps yelling it. (He also doesn’t have an orange slice.)

Instead of posting “Make Some Noise” on the scoreboard to tell patrons when to cheer, the Nats should tell them when to sit down. My favorite usher, Martha, does her best, but when she politely asks people to wait until the play is over to make their way down the row, she gets puzzled glares from a lot of the ticket holders. Sadly, the words “entitled” and “Washingtonian” go together like Roger Clemens and denial.

I realize that’s a clumsy headline above, but it narrowly beat “Here’s Your 2012 Comeback Player Of The Year”. Seattle summoned LHP Oliver Perez from their PCL Tacoma affiliate yesterday, marking the former Mets/Pirates starter’s return to the big leagues after a disastrous 2010 campaign. “He was throwing the ball well in AAA,” Mariners skipper Eric Wedge told The Seattle Times’ Mason Kelly. “Obviously (he has) a lot of big-league experience, a high strikeout ratio from the left side. We felt like it was a good time to take a look at him.” And at 28-39, what does Wedge have to lose?

Perez, whose last major-league appearance was with the New York Mets on Oct. 3, 2010, signed a minor-league deal with the Mariners in January and was 2-2 with a save and a 4.65 earned-run average in 22 minor-league relief appearances for the Rainiers this season.

After spending the 2011 season with Class AA Harrisburg in the Washington Nationals’ minor-league system, Perez said he considered retiring before finding his fastball in the Mexican Winter League. “I started working hard,” Perez said. “My velocity is back and that’s got me very excited.”

“If you look at his years of experience and what he’s accomplished, he’s accomplished a great deal in the big leagues,” Wedge said. “But this is a different role for him. We feel like he’s made a good adjustment with it and it’s a good time to get him up here.”

06.16.12

You could answer “Eddie Trunk” and the joke would work just as well, but “a drummer” is the preferred response. And with all due respect to everyone out there who thinks they’re the next Robo Elvin Jones, there are few aspiring drummers who’ve sought a steady gig with quite the gusto of the gentleman who composed the following Craigslist advertisement :

I do NOT play to a click track or backing tracks and GO SCREW if you think I’m gonna “tone it down a little, bro” so you can piddle away on your stringed sissy box. I WILL NOT play hotel cafe and don’t take direction from ninnies who live in their fucking parents basement and whack off to dreams of hanging with Jack Johnson and rapping about his “process”, you piece of shit. I am a real mother fucker with balls of steel and have a drumset that loves to be ass fucked mercilessly from behind and I need to join a band who understands that stage-sex is part of the fucking game, dude. So when I’m fucking the shit outta the kit, you can’t be the guy in the corner beating your limp, taffy dick wishing that you could stick your dick in too, NO! You get that dick hard and fuck the stage with me, pussy boy. I’m so sick of stealing the show and would really love to meet some real sons of fucking bitches who aren’t afraid to use a sweat band for its intended purpose: wiping off fucking sweat, cum, groupies, pussy juice, blood, etc.

Do not write me for reasons of sass because I will FIND YOU and shred your fucking face with my SHIT-STORMING DRUM GODLINESS!

This was simply a pathetic, small-minded, and abjectly shameful display by some portion of tonight’s home crowd and frankly I’m disgusted by it. Anyone who considers himself a passionate fan and a compassionate human being should feel likewise.

06.15.12

Would a major publisher have advanced Mike Piazza $800,000 merely to find out the favorite backstop’s favorite King’s X album? Can one fashion a New York Times best seller from the words, “Where’s Mota?” repeated 50,000 times? While you’re pitying ghostwriter Eddie Trunk, keep in mind that serial Piazza-basherMurray Chass is waiting for Metal Mike’s autobiography — supposedly scheduled for publication next February — and believes there’s something fishy about said tome hitting the shelves after the next Hall Of Fame class is announced.

It seemed unlikely that the former catcher would admit to steroid use and jeopardize, even for an $800,000 advance, his chances of being elected to the Hall of Fame. The publisher, however, will not issue the book until after the Hall of Fame results are known.

Craig Muder, the Hall’s communications director, said no date has been set for release of the results but noted that the announcement usually is made between Jan. 5 and 15. Voting ends Dec. 31.

Maybe Simon & Schuster has innocently planned the Piazza publication for soon after the announcement for marketing purposes, but it might just as easily have agreed to a post-election publication to insure that the book would not keep Piazza out of the Hall.

If, on the other hand, the book includes a steroids admission, all I can say is shame on Piazza and his publisher. With that possibility in mind, though, the voters would be wise to withhold their votes from Piazza until a future election. He will have 14 more chances.

The hypocrisy of so many people involved in its assembly and, more to the cutthroat point, the ostracizing of Isiah Thomas, is both wretched and retching.

This may be the dirtiest a sports figure has ever been treated. Let us count the outrages:

The most egregious is committee members with sway giving Jordan the right to banish Thomas from the team. The two had a long-standing beef that covered a multitude of real and imagined transgressions. So, when Jordan let it be known through agent David Falk he refused to be teammates with Thomas, the powers that be folded along the dotted lines.

The NBA was in the early stages of a $3 million (money, marketing … and money) global initiative. Hence, Russ Granik, at the time deputy commissioner and liaison to USA Basketball, and Rod Thorn, who drafted His Airness as Bulls general manager and a league fixture in one capacity or another now for 50 years, weren’t about to tell Jordan to stay home.

And management wonders where players got the idea they should be consulted about player personnel decisions and why they have no compunction about undermining coaches.

06.14.12

….but it wouldn’t hurt to have one, either. Writing for Forbes, Webster University Director of Sportsimpacts and Associate Professor of Economics, Dr. Patrick Rishe considers the latest PED allegations leveled against 7-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, and opines that even if the cyclist / cancer activist / marketing tsunami is ultimately found not guilty, his reputation and earning power have suffered a serious blow.

(1) As it relates to steroid use by athletes, the general public has become largely cynical towards athletes linked with steroid use. Fans value a sense of fair play, and it is my perception of the public’s perception that PED users are seen as cheats and phonies by the average fan.

(2) As the public became inundated with scandal after scandal during the 2000s (with Barry Bonds and Marion Jones among numerous high-profile athletes linked to PEDs), the unfortunate aftermath for those accused or suspected of PED use is the public’s presumption of the athlete’s guilt…regardless of whether a particular athlete indeed is guilty of PED use. Consistent with this opinion are the summary opinions shared by ESPN’s Kristi Dosh in an article which suggests that Ryan Braun’s marketability as a product endorser will likely take a substantial hit because of his ties to PEDs during the 2011-12 off-season…even though he was eventually found to be in the clear (no pun intended).

(3) Companies more than ever, for both financial and public relations reasons, are extremely sensitive and risk-averse as it pertains to which athletes they choose to develop a marketing relationship with. Ever intent on winning over new customers while similarly intent on not losing existing customers, the last thing a company generally wishes to engage in is a endorsement relationship with an athlete who they believe either has a currently tainted reputation or too many skeletons in their closet.

Portugal withstood a pair of Nicklas Bendtner goals in Wednesday’s 3-2 defeat of Denmark, a contest that could result in the Danish striker being penalized for displaying a sponsor’s logo on his MAN PANTS. From the BBC :

Uefa is investigating the matter, while the Danish Football Association could also take action because it had an exclusive deal with another company.

Sponsors pay millions to be associated with the European Championship and governing body Uefa has strict rules preventing ambush marketing.

The company which Arsenal striker Bendtner was advertising on the waistband of his underwear said no money had exchanged hands and the underpants have been sent to several other unnamed players.

Orioles 2B Brian Roberts returned to active duty Tuesday night after multiple concussions kept him from the lineup for over a year. Roberts was sporting the sort of dual flap helmet often seen in the batting cages near my local mini golf emporium, but explained to the Baltimore Sun’s Eduardo A. Encina, ““After talking to my doctor, we just decided, you know we’ll go with function over looks.” How many times have managers said the same thing about David Wells?

Roberts, who played his first major league game in nearly 13 months Tuesday after battling multiple concussions, is wearing a helmet with double ear flaps to add protection at the plate and on the basepaths.

“The double ear flap looks funny, doesn’t it?” Roberts said before Wednesday’s game against Pittsburgh. “I just decided, ‘Why take a chance of getting hit on the side that doesn’t have a flap.’ It’s their newest version. It can take a little more velocity.”

06.13.12

NBA Commissioner David Stern took considerable exception to CBS Sports Network host Jim Rome asking if “the fix was in” during the recent draft lottery that resulted in the New Orleans Hornets winning the top pick. When Stern replied, “have you stopped beating your wife yet?”, Rome claimed he was “shocked” at the implication a journalist with his impeccable track record would’ve asked a dumb question merely for the sake of provocation. From the Albany Times-Union’s Pete Dougherty :

“When I asked that question, I did not in any way expect that response. To be honest, I thought it was a softball question. It would have been an easy opportunity for him to address something that’s out there and that he would just summarily dismiss it out of hand. I had no idea he would get that upset. I was shocked by it.”

Stern’s initial response was, “I have two answers for that. I’ll give you the easy one: No, and a statement: Shame on you for asking.”
Rome, whose show airs locally on WOFX (980 AM), tried to defend why he needed to ask the question, but the commissioner wasn’t backing down. Stern then asked Rome, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”

“A lot of people don’t know that phrase, so they thought it was extremely out of line,” said Rome, who is married with two sons. “I understood it, I knew where he was going with it.

“I thought it was inappropriate because, what it is, it’s a rhetorical device to insinuate I asked him a loaded question. I don’t think my question to him was loaded. I thought it was a very simple and very direct question.

“I thought the blog Deadspin hit it perfectly. Had I asked the question, ‘When did you start fixing the draft lottery?’ that would have been a more appropriate response. It would have been a loaded question, but I don’t think my question was loaded.”

Pierzynski, who is a fan favorite in Chicago, said he’s made enemies in Anaheim because of the trapped third strike in the 2005 ALCS, in San Francisco and Minnesota because he played there, in Minnesota and Detroit because of the AL Central rivalries and Oakland because “I hit a home run in their moneyball year in the 2002 playoffs to kind of end their season.’’

In New York and Boston, where fans are said to be more sophisticated, “they don’t care,’’ Pierzynski added.

I guess “This Time, No One Gives A Fuck” was amongst the rejected copy. Trust me, no one even needs to wait for the the Midsummer Classic to be played — every single one of these shirts can be shipped to whatever third world nation received “Patriots 2012 Super Bowl Champs” tees. At which point no one will wear them because they make absolutely no sense.

(possibly not queued up at Citi Field for Jon Rauch’s next jog from the bullpen)

Mets reliever Jon Rauch capped off a weekend for the team that was as miserable as the prior week’s sweep of the Cardinals was glorious, allowing a 9th inning, game-winning HR to Yankees C Russell Martin (his 2nd of the day) in the hosts’ 5-4 victory at the Nu Stadium. Afterwards, some of social media’s creepier types (or at least those unwilling to pepper Rauch with references to The Fall) suggested the towering pitcher, “hang yourself” or “choke on food, not in games”. Citing Twitter’s anonymity, Amazin Avenue’s Matthew Callen writes, “I’ve been to a billion ballgames and heard crowds scream nasty things at ballplayers, but never once have I heard someone in a ballpark wish death on a player.” While I’m hopeful that Armando Benitez or Charles Smith have memories as selective (or hearing as poor) as Callen, I cannot disagree with him that allegedly civilized persons ought to “draw the line at telling another person to kill themselves”. And you need not be old enough to remember Donnie Moore to concur with such a reasonable stance.

Because we are constantly told that New York is So Tough, some people take it as their birthright to prove it by becoming the worst people ever and expressing that “toughness” in the manner shown above. If an athlete can’t take a very personal attack–saying someone should no longer be alive is about as personal as it gets–maybe he’s not cut out for New York, The City That Never Sleeps or Stops Telling Strangers To Kill Themselves.

In truth, these expressions of “toughness” are cowardice in its most craven form, several rungs down the ladder from ringing someone’s doorbell and running away. That’s because none of these people literally intends what they’ve written. They’re just deriving a crank call thriil from hassling a famous person in the most vile way. Like all bad comedians, they confuse meanness and violence with humor. Rauch shouldn’t have to endure this just because be plays in New York. Death threats shouldn’t be one of his job hazards any more than heavy sack beatings should be one of yours, whatever it is you do for a living.

06.12.12

Holland’s 1-0 shock Group B defeat to Denmark Saturday was galling to fans of the former, especially considering the Danes’ paucity of scoring chances (ie., one). “All UEFA are interested in is a punctual kick-off, sponsor interests and the size of player’s trousers,” argues Total Football’s Ernst Bouwes, who has a solution prevent future injustices from victimizing the Oranje.

The Dutch FA have issued a proposal for the next FIFA Executive Committee meeting in Zürich that a football game should no longer be confined to ninety minutes, but just continue until the better team are ahead. They have the backing of at least Colombia, Hungary, Austria and several African nations. Dutch FA Chairman Michael van Praag (above) believes this is the moment to take this travesty by the horns. “It is not only at tournaments, that we are confronted with these wrongful results. Every week in the Eredivisie, there is a better team that ends up on the wrong side of the score. We can no longer put up with this. I mean, teams and coaches put a lot of effort in training and playing a beautiful game. They should be rewarded with the points. The emphasis on goals in this sport is so dominant. We can put a man on the moon, but are not able to let the better team win?”

When he was chairman of Ajax in the early nineties Van Praag presided over the biggest upset ever. Midtable Volendam came to the Olympic Stadium to play Ajax. Their coach Wim Rijsbergen parked the bus in front of goal, they scored and despite 45 open chances for the hometeam, Volendam left with a 0-1 win. Afterwards Rijsbergen was vilified during the press conference by angry hacks as he had spoiled their evening. To the Dutch, football is art, a show, not a sport. On the question if he ever felt sorry for losing the World Cup final in 1974, Johan Cruyff, who hardly reflects on his playing days, explained that the Dutch had been the better team during the whole tournament. No one remembers the Germans for winning the cup, he said. Everyone remembers the WC 74 as the launch of Total Football. Who cares for a title, he almost added.